When warm gold light spills out from inside the cafe, when we savour the warm air on our bare arms and legs, when we know the day’s nearly done because it’s turning indigo, that’s when we’re in heaven.

Gastro Ghetto: Get there quick

Grégoire Jacquet opened his eponymous California restaurant in 2002, doing classical French dining, take-out and catering. He’s clearly doing something right, because he’s keeping two locations afloat. One is in Berkeley, in what he likes to call “the gastro ghetto,” because it’s down the road from Chez Panisse. Some ghetto. Reputation by location: is that a thing now? We’ll allow it. If you’re good enough to stand and hold your own next to a great, you get points for that. His second location is in Oakland.

You can’t tell by looking at it, but blue crab is what makes this a dish worth stopping for at Pennsylvania 6, near Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, if you’ll happen to be in NYC some time soon. Photo by Byron Smith for the WSJ.

China Latina is not just the name of chef Julieta Ballesteros’s new NYC restaurant at the Hotel Indigo. It’s a descriptor that also nails her fusion cuisine. Say hello to her wonton tacos. Photo: Ramsay de Give for WSJ.

Maybe, in the beginning, it was all about the yeast

Or, How a landing page delivers a brand

To my eyes, this establishment is a hipster couple. She’s the sweet, the cupcake, and he’s the beardy suds, the beer. That’s flagrantly sexist, but it was the only way I could “get” this business identity at first, because connecting the two, in terms of name stamp and food pairings, I wasn’t feeling it. … Read more…

He makes funny about all things marketing, with clever pieces like this one, plus solid marketing savvy besides. He’s a powerful influencer. He gave the keynote at Google’s marketing conference in September, and SXSW ranked his 2012 talk No. 3 among 500 speakers. Although he’s drawn a lot of great ones, what was timely for me about this cartoon in particular was that I’d just had two “I’ll-have-what-she’s-having” situations that week…. Read more…

Dave and Dave made some babies. It took them nine months. They called them Joulies. Here are a couple of Joulies doing what they do best: keeping hot beverages at 140ºF.

Here’s how Joulies work:

Their stainless steel exterior holds a liquid that absorbs the heat from your just-poured, too-hot-to-drink coffee, until it reaches 140ºF. Then, as your coffee starts to cool down, the Joulies release their stored energy to keep your coffee hot. Which explains why the Daves named their babies after James Prescott Joule, the 19th century physicist whose work led to the discovery of the first law of thermodynamics.

Smarties in their own right

Dave Petrillo [lovingly holding Joulies above] and Dave Jackson are both mechanical engineers. They were motivated to make Joulies because they were fed up with having only that small window of opportunity to enjoy their coffee at the right temperature.

Coffee always seems to start out too hot and then quickly gets too cold, leaving you feeling you’ve missed the boat, coffee-temperature-flavour-wise. Speaking for myself, temperature is the most important flavour element in my coffee, which is why this story dug into me so deep.

Getting down to business

The Daves made the first 100 Joulies themselves. “It took about a couple of hours each,” one of them said in this video they made for Kickstarter, a site for startups to pitch ideas and crowd-source funding.

The Joulie Daddies asked for $9,500 — to match their half of the first mechanized run — and offered pre-orders to individuals and coffee shops. But Kickstarter is such a great platform, and the Joulies are such a great idea, that the Daves came away with over 32 times that amount and 8,000 pre-orders. Read more…